Friday, October 26, 2012

Among the
spate of movies inspired by the ongoing financial crisis, ‘The City Below’ (German:
‘Unter dir die Stadt’) is definitely one exceptional voice. While many of those –
think ‘Too big to fail’ or ‘Margin Call’ - provide us with a tension filled
account of the inner workings of events that led to the crash of banks and
markets in 2008 this movie is anything but a thriller. Technically it is a
romance, but it is essentially a portrait of the ‘sociotop’ which is the world
of the ‘one percent’, the top echelons of a global bank in Germany’s banking capital
Frankfurt.

As such the
movie – rather than adding to feelings of anger, rage and disgust about greedy
bankers – provides us, as it were, with a clinical diagnosis of the de-humanized,
de-emotionalized and fake rational world which steers our contemporary version
of capitalism. We enter a world actually devoid of glamour or anything to
aspire to – and the film leaves us wondering whether the working life of the ‘one percent’ after all is, if anything, worth our pity rather than our envy. The synopsis of the plot runs like this:

A man and a woman at an art exhibition share a fleeting moment of attraction, which neither can act upon. Days later, a chance second meeting leads to an innocent coffee and the two strangers - both married - toy with their unexplainable fascination for each other. Svenja is curious and finds herself in a hotel room with Roland, but she does not consummate an affair. A powerful executive at the large bank where Svenja's husband works, Roland is used to getting what he wants. He manipulates the transfer of her husband to Indonesia to replace a recently murdered bank manager. Unaware of Roland's actions, Svenja now ceases to resist...

Watching
the movie I could not help being reminded of Marx’s point in ‘Das Kapital’ where
he differentiates between ‘dead labor’ (as in machines and assets) and ‘living
labor’ (as in human workers). Marx made the point that capitalism ultimately results
in the subjugation of living labor under dead labor, the ultimate de-humanization
and alienation of 'human resources' (as we are called in today's business world) through a rationale of maximal value extraction.
In his fascinating book ‘Dead Men Working’, our colleague Peter Fleming argues
based on studies of call centre workers and other low skilled labor jobs, that we
increasingly witness an army of all but physically dead men and women roped
into the relentless pursuit of productivity and efficiency. Mind you, in today’s
movie, death is quite physically part of the business: Svenja’s husband Oliver only
finds out after being transferred to run the bank’s operations in Indonesia
that his predecessor there had actually been brutally butchered while doing his
job. ‘Necrocapitalism’ – as as onother of our colleagues, Bobby Banerjee, has coined the current system of
global capitalism – though is not just hitting the disenfranchised, under skilled
and exploited working masses (such as those killed South African miners in their attempt to
resist exploitation and abuse this summer). ‘The city below’ shows us the life of
those at the top – the ‘dead men working’ in the power houses of capitalism - and
how their capacity for true human interaction, emotion, and passion has been
extinguished, channeled and crowed out.

What better
backdrop for exposing this than the realm of romantic endeavors? When Svenja’s husband, as she puts it, is ‘annoyingly’ friendly to her she immediately knows there must
be an agenda: she smells that he ‘invests’ some niceties into their relations
for a ‘return’: her putting up with him relocating for two years to Indonesia. The
grammar of their relationship is the one of business relations: they had some
sort of contract, ‘a deal’ that they would stay for some time in Frankfurt and
we witness Oliver’s skills - brilliant but utterly dismal for a lover – to re-negotiate.

Svenja’s
affair with Roland (a board member at the bank where Oliver works) takes this
even further. For Roland, who is used to being obeyed and not questioned, the ‘execution’
of his desire follows a strictly transactional pattern, hoping that his status
and clout will open him the doors. Even after their first sexual encounters he occasionally
lapses back into addressing Svenja in the third person – the polite German
level of addressing business partners. Roland has lost any sense of a human,
emotional touch: when they make love the first time Svenja has to remind him that
she is not ‘made of glass’ – unlike the soulless, deceivingly transparent furniture
of ‘dead capital’, which surrounds most of his living days. One time she asks
him to extinguish their ritual post-coital cigarette on her arm. But this movie
is not ‘Fight Club’, where at least the sensation of pain allows the heroes to feel
human again in an otherwise commoditized and instrumentalized word. In 'The City Below' Roland just manages a hapless Freudian ‘Übersprungshandlung’
(Displacement Activity), he can all but inflict this pain on her purse. The movie
is modeled on the biblical story of King David who sends the husband of his
lover out to be killed in battle. But unlike the ancient romance, Roland and
Svenja’s relationship goes nowhere – and even that is part of their negotiated
arrangements.

Smoking,
by the way, has an unmissably symbolic presence in this movie. Currently in most
Western countries banned from all spaces of capitalist work, travel and relaxation
as a pleasure ultimately leading to death, in the movie it becomes the great
one thing where rules can be broken and intimacy is still possible. The affair
between Roland and Svenja starts over the inadvertently shared cigarette in a
museum. His first line ever to her is in fact ‘Smoking is forbidden here’, and
arguably it is this moment when his passion is ignited. There is not a single of the
love scenes in the film which is not – I am not sure what – clouded or mystified
by cigarette smoke. In a world of those dead alive the forbidden is the sensual;
and an arguably dangerous pleasure is the niche in where whatever is left of
human passion and emotion can be fleetingly enjoyed.

Roland and
Svenja’s affair shows that humans, of course, cannot totally survive in a world
where every decision, every relation is governed by an instrumental,
self-interest driven rationale for maximizing one’s own or the company’s
returns and economic success. Roland carves out spaces where he tries to escape.
Once a day his driver takes him to some dump where he watches Junkies injecting
their drugs. In essence the affair with Svenja is a similar attempt, and towards
her he tries to reconstruct himself as a human being by taking her to what he
pretends to be his modest working class childhood home (which in fact is the
home of the murdered employee). These are not just kinky distractions in the
movie, these are common patterns among top executives. We should not be
surprised, for instance, that Ex-Goldman
Sachs Boss and US Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson for all his life has been an
avid environmentalist and nature conservancy wonk in his free time – a contrast
to his day job which could not be more gasping and irrational.

Having
worked as a consultant for three month at Germany’s largest Bank in Frankfurt
13 years ago the entire movie struck a strange déjà vu for me. It's silent pace,
the sterile, nearly theatrical acting of the main protagonists, the architecture and interior design, the language ridden with Anglicisms - all this resonates very well with my
memories from that time. Despite unearthing a rather dire reality the movie is
a very watchable, even humerous experience leading us into an otherwise hard to
be experienced space – the world of global finance taking place far above ‘the
city below’...

DM

The movie 'The City Below' plays at the GOETHE FILMS@TIFF Bell Lightbox in Toronto, October 30, 6.30pm

Friday, October 5, 2012

Following on from the earlier guest post from our York colleague Dawn Bazely regarding the Globe and Mail plagiarism case, we asked Dawn to tie up the loose ends by identifying some of the positives that have emerged from the whole affair. This is what she has to say....

There was a lot of learning to be had from following the
Margaret Wente story last week. All in all, last week was important if you have
ever written an assignment (e.g. essay or laboratory report), or have taught
any form of writing or have read a newspapers or magazine. This covers pretty
much most of the Canadian population!

Questions were raised by mainstream journalists, bloggers
and hundreds of the readers of online stories, about whether Wente was guilty
of plagiarism, and the behaviour of a number of Globe and Mail staff in
responding to this allegation. These stories came out in publications that
included Macleans,
the Toronto
Star, the National
Post, and Toronto Life, and even the Guardian.
Those asking questions included John Miller, a
former dean of journalism at Ryerson, Elizabeth
James with Vancouver’s North Shore News and the blogger at the Sixth Estate
who wrote about Howmedia
should handle a plagiarism scandal

Why were the Globe and Mail’s ethics and standards being
called into question? In a nutshell, several columns by Globe and Mail
columnist Margaret Wente had been scrutinized by an Ottawa artist and
professor, Carol Wainio in her Media Culpa blog. Over several years, Media
Culpa posted comparisons of older text by other authors to the text in some
of Wente’s columns. Wainio made several of these comparisons. Wente’s columns
made no attributions or reference to this other work, and strings of words were
identical.

What made it possible for everyone to weigh in with an
opinion, was that the Media Culpa’s blogs provided similar comparisons if text to
those produced by plagiarism software, such as Turnitin.com. With Turnitin
output reports, side-by-side text comparisons are made. Every course director
and teaching assistant must make a judgment about these Turnitin text reports,
and decide what to tolerate in terms of the cutting and pasting of text. There will
be a process for taking this up with students whose work is identified in this
way.

The response that unfolded to Media Culpa’s posts, which
Wainio had conveyed on several occasions to the Globe and Mail, was that various
editors and columnists (including Wente herself) defended
a position on plagiarism in which a certain amount cutting and pasting of text
written by someone else is to be expected and accepted. Reasons for
downplaying Wainio’s text comparisons included the pressures
of meeting deadlines. A number of well known writers in “old media”, aka
the mainstream press defended Wente. Some of them expressed the opinion that
upholding the standards and principles of “academic” plagiarism, or the
standards taught in university and high school, was just too difficult. The Wente
apologists included Terence Corcoran and Dan Delmar at the National Post. Back
at the Globe and Mail, the editor, John Stackhouse and the public editor,
Sylvia Stead provided very muted and restrained responses, only after torrents
of internet chatter ensured that the story did not die down.

Is cutting and pasting
so unavoidable, so that we are we all guilty of using other peoples’ phrases
and sentences?

Some members of the reading public seem to think so. Jack,
commented at the crux
of the matter blog: “So she quoted without naming sources. I rarely do.
Does that make me a plagiarist? “Sloppy journalism”? Disagree. If that were
true we would all be guilty but we aren’t are we?”

The title of Dan Delmar’s column at the National Post was:
Are
we all “self-righteous” sinners cast(ing) the first stone at Margaret Wente?My answer to this is a definite “no”. Biology laboratory reports provide a
good case study for evaluating just how prevalent cutting and pasting actually
is. Hundreds of student do the same experiments every year, and write up their
results. Up to to now, thousands of these reports have been run through plagiarism
software such as Turnitin. This software checks for patterns in words, and
compares one person’s text against that from other sources: the internet, other
student papers, journals, and whatever other text is available and accessible.

The Turnitin reports shows that it IS possible for thousands
of students to write up the same experiment with relatively little overlap in
sentence structure. The one exception is the methods section, in which students
often quote directly from the laboratory manual, and it has been easy to put
guidelines into place for quoting them.

Nevertheless, IS the
academic integrity project in jeopardy?

There may be a very real case for arguing that different
kinds of writers should be held to different standards, but there is no doubt
in my mind that if Margaret Wente had submitted the columns in which Wainio
detected unattributed text as undergraduate assignments, that she would have
been called in for a chat with the teaching assistant and course director. Not
surprisingly, a US Gallup poll found that journalists
aren’t high on the public’s honesty list.

While the entire affair raised serious questions about the
ethical behavior of powerful members of “old media”, in general, I tend to
agree with the Back of the Book blog, that there has been an upside
to the Wente case.

Good pedagogy includes raising awareness about the rules of
academic integrity and plagiarism. Academic integrity is not primarily about
punishment but about learning how not to plagiarize, and give credit
appropriately. Many of the frontline workers, such as grad
student blogger, gradstudentdrone, in the war on cut and paste have stepped
forward during l’affaire Wente, to acknowledge the challenges, and the grey
areas of confronting plagiarism.

The reader responses have shown that these principles and
ethical codes relating to academic integrity are taken very seriously by many
outside of academia and the media. Being able to view the text comparisons
directly, was no doubt a contributing factor to the outrage at the behavior of
senior editors, and the picture that their actions paint of the corporate
culture. Carol Wainio wrote several responses on her blog and in the mainstream
media that were calm, measured and logical. This all served to reinforce
the impression that a section of the media establishment has been making judgment
calls that put them out of line with teachers, readers and members
of the mainstream media who are more apt to look at the evidence without
blinking. Kathy English, the Toronto Star’s public editor described the Wente
case as a test
of accountability.

Perhaps the most positive outcome is the broad discussion that
the Wente story generated. A very cool example is the discussion thread about
this on the Vancouver
Canucks Hockey team forum. Thank goodness the fans have something to
distract them. This incident also gave many people cause for reflection and
rememberance, such as David Climenhaga’s raising the tragic case of Toronto
Star journalist Ken Adachi,
who committed suicide after being found plagiarizing.

The question
we have to ask though is whether IKEA really is doing anything much wrong here?
After all, isn't it up to them what pictures they want to put in their own
catalogues? And don't they have a responsibility to meet local cultural norms as
long as no ones fundamental rights are being infringed? Its not like any women
were directly disadvantaged by their actions, we're they?

As far as we
can see, though, IKEA hasn't been very smart or subtle in appearing to airbrush
its women from Saudi. As far as cultural sensitivity goes, its a pretty basic
effort to fit in with cultural norms in the country. But first, let's remember
that IKEAs catalogues are increasingly just computer generated anyway, so maybe
the women were never actually "there" in the first place. And second,
let's not pretend that IKEA catalogues are a glowing example of diversity to begin with. Show us the rich ethnic mix in the catalogue. Or for that
matter, the representations of women in hijab that constitute a large part of
the female population in many parts of the world where the firm operates.

A global
company it may be, but a globally diverse catalogue it is not. IKEA markets a
homogenous global product for a global audience with less tailoring to local
tastes even than other global giants such as McDonald's or Wall-Mart
attempt. So what are we complaining
about here? That IKEA hasn't been 100% homogenous after all and we don't like
it? Is homogeneity really the best solution to equality and diversity problems?

That's not to
say it doesn't matter what pictures companies use in their marketing campaigns,
because in our view, it certainly does. This is especially so for big companies
like IKEA because they have such a major impact on the visual world around us.
But demanding that they present a unified image across the globe just seems to
be missing the point. Shouldn't we be
demanding that they present a genuinely diverse representation of their
customers, maybe even one tailored to the societies in which they operate?
Disappearing white women from your catalogues in Saudi Arabia certainly doesn't
look good, but it's hardly the biggest problem here.

Regular
readers of our academic research will know that we have a long standing
interest in the role of companies in shaping people's citizenship opportunitiesand experience. IKEA here is clearly failing to promote the cause of women's
equality in Saudi, insofar as equality is measured in terms of representation.
This is one part of the picture (in the same way that failing to represent
ethnic minorities or those with different sexual orientations in advertising
presents and reinforces a skewed image of society). But it's not the only
important one.

A critical
role is also played by the company in its hiring and promotion policies, and in
its other efforts to promote (or not) equality in Saudi. If the company isn't
doing a good job on these fronts (and this is a question that demands further
investigation) then presenting a pretty diversity picture in its catalogues
would be little more than window dressing anyway. Let's hope the latest scandal
presages some deeper consideration of how to deal with diversity at the company
given its increasing global spread. Saudi women, if not the curiously
disappearing catalogue models, deserve no less. Photo: IKEAThanks to Jeremy Sandler for alerting us to the story

Translate

Follow by email

Andrew Crane [L] and Dirk Matten [R]

Welcome to the Crane and Matten blog - for informed commentary and expert analysis on the everchanging world of corporate responsibility.

We are two business school professors best known for our books and research articles on business ethics and corporate citizenship. We wrote the Crane and Matten blog from 2008-2015, offering unique insight on a range of issues from across the globe.

Andrew Craneis Professor of Business and Society in the School of Management, University of Bath.

Dirk Matten is the Hewlett Packard Chair in Corporate Social Responsibility in the Schulich School of Business, York University.